Liberty

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

On Tuesday morning Jake Grafton wore casual civilian clothes and rode the Metro to the L’Enfant Plaza station. He exited the train and took the escalator up to the large indoor shopping mall. After one wrong turn, he found the bakery shop he wanted and went in. At a tiny table against the rear wall with his back to the entrance sat Sal Molina. Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, he was buried in a newspaper while he munched a bagel and drank coffee. After Jake stood in line and got something to eat, he joined Molina. No one in the place paid any attention to either of them.

“Good morning,” Molina said.

“Morning, sir,” Jake Grafton replied, and checked the interior of his bagel to be sure the cook had left the cheese off the egg.

“I’ll say this for you, Admiral — you have more enemies in this town than any other sailor I know.”

“The navy teaches you how to make a splash.”

“So tell me about this woman who showed up on your doorstep.”

After a glance around to ensure no one was eavesdropping, Jake did so. “Harry Estep and I think she’s telling the truth, for whatever that’s worth,” he concluded. “Harry says the CDs are gold.”

Molina had asked no questions during Jake’s recitation. Now he said, “I got a call last night from Emerick.” Emerick was the director of the FBI. “The little weasel was complaining that you want to put that Russian woman in the Federal Witness Protection Program.”

“Someone will probably kill her if we don’t,” Jake said.

“He was bitching that she was in the country illegally, that the tourist visa she got in Cairo was fraudulently issued by an ex-boyfriend.”

“Bet he also said that she was probably a Russian spy.”

“As a matter of fact, he did. So did DeGarmo when I talked to him.”

Jake bit off a mouthful of bagel and chewed thoughtfully.

“One of these guys is going to leak this to the press,” Molina said thoughtfully. “Or to one of their friends on the Hill.”

Grafton captured Molina’s gaze. “Your problem,” he said distinctly, just loudly enough for Molina to hear. “If you want some free advice, cut their nuts off before they do it. Don’t wait.”

“Uh-huh.”

“While you are at it, you might cast a cold eye on your good buddy Butch Lanham. He’s trying to screw up the courage to do some leaking to a reporter.”

“How do you know that?”

“You don’t want to know. Believe me. What is it with that guy, anyway?”

Sal Molina grimaced. “He wants direct access to the president. Access is power in Washington. He wants my head on a plate.”

“Hell of a guy.”

Molina went on to another subject. “DeGarmo also complained about a CIA officer attached to your staff who had some kind of aerial adventure Sunday evening.”

“Guy named Carmellini. Two agency colleagues tried to kill him,” Jake said, then sipped his coffee. “They put him in concrete boots and were going to dump him into the ocean still alive. Sort of what Lanham is trying to do to you and me. Carmellini killed them first.”

“And the reason?”

“They tried to blackmail him into telling them what’s going on in my office. Access. That’s what he and I think it was all about, anyway.”

“DeGarmo was bitching that you and this guy — Carmellini? — won’t tell him or the FBI anything about the blackmail end of it.”

“Yep.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Sure you want to know?”

“Try me.”

“They thought they had Carmellini on the hook for an old killing.”

Molina pursed his lips. He had a hell of a poker face, but his surprise showed. Whatever he thought he was going to hear, that wasn’t it.

“Did he do it?” Molina asked after a bit.

“I didn’t ask him,” Jake replied curtly.

“What do you think?”

The admiral shrugged. “Probably did.”

“And you want this guy on your team?”

“You surround yourself with people who can do the job you need to accomplish,” Jake explained. “So do I. But we play on different fields. I don’t care about gilt-edge résumés or family connections or Ivy League degrees. Carmellini’s a good thief and a hell of a burglar and he knows how to get stuff done.” He turned over a hand. “Trustworthy people with brains and balls are hard to find these days.”

Molina couldn’t let it alone. “Who’d he kill? Girlfriend or mom or the kid next door?”

“A guy he ran across in Cuba a few years ago.”

“You don’t seem very upset about it.”

“I’m sure he had a good reason. You could find out more if you want to, but I advise you not to try. And I suggest you stop asking questions that you won’t like the answers to.”

Sal Molina nudged the remainder of his breakfast with a finger and made a face.

Jake pressed. “Don’t get cold feet now. You let me spring Zelda from prison.”

“You trust her?”

“Not really. Bureaucrats wringing their hands, worrying about the regs and their careers aren’t going to get it done. I think she can help. I need to tell her about the items we’re looking for. She can’t help me search the haystack unless I tell her what the needle looks like.”

“She doing you any good now?”

“Yeah. She hacked into the FBI’s investigative files. I’m seeing everything Emerick is.”

Molina sat frozen, staring at him openmouthed, speechless for probably the first time in his life.

“Just because the president told Emerick and DeGarmo to cooperate didn’t mean they were going to do it,” Jake explained. “Bureaucrats protect their rice bowls. It’s the survival instinct, I suppose.”

Molina snorted.

Jake continued: “Now for the bad news — Emerick isn’t seeing much. The FBI’s computer systems are hopeless. They have thirty-four different databases over there, most of which can’t talk to each other. The systems are difficult to search, and in some cases searches are futile because the field offices are as much as six months behind on data entry. I hear a lot of agents keep private case files on paper.”

“Zelda hacked into the CIA computer yet?”

“Not to the best of my knowledge. I told her to stay out of it.”

“Will she do what you tell her?”

“That’s the question.”

Molina tried his coffee and found that it was cold. He made a face. “How many spots are on Emerick’s hole cards?”

“The most promising leads are in Florida. The joint task force down there is tracking seventeen groups that might be terrorists. Emerick has his right-hand man, Hob Tulik, down there personally running the show and reporting back daily. They’re hoping one or two or three or four of those cells will lead them to the bombs.”

“What do you think?”

“I hope to God they’re right.”

Sal Molina looked slowly around the room, taking in everything. His gaze returned to Jake Grafton’s face. The gray eyes looking into his were the color of the North Atlantic in winter. “Find the fucking things,” Molina said. “I don’t care what you have to do.”

“Okay.”

“So tell me about this thing you found buried in a golf course.”

“We don’t know what it is. A bomb is a possibility, obviously.”

“You gonna dig it up?”

“Not right quick. Whoever put it there probably has an eye or two on it.”

“What do you want me to tell the president?”

“Whatever you think appropriate. He trusts your discretion and good judgment. Use them.”

“Brains and balls, huh?” Molina extracted a packet of Rolaids from a pocket and popped a couple in his mouth. As he chewed he said to Grafton, “I can see how you earned your reputation.”

“Which is?”

“The toughest nut-cutter in uniform.”

Jake snorted derisively. “Don’t say that to my wife. She still thinks I’m a nice guy.”

“You got her fooled. Congrats. I wish you every happiness.”

Sal Molina arose, tucked his newspaper under his arm, and headed for the door. Jake went to the coffeepot for a refill.

Two hours later when Molina briefed the president, he said, “Jake Grafton’s the guy for this job, all right. He may be the most dangerous man alive. Emerick and DeGarmo haven’t a clue who they’re dealing with.”

“Can he find those bombs?” the president asked.

“I don’t know,” replied a pensive Sal Molina. “Maybe we’re all walking the plank together, living out the last few days of Western civilization.”

Thayer Michael Corrigan and Karl Luck were concerned. Where Olympic Voyager had gone they had no idea. Not a word from Dutch Vandervelt or Omar Caliph in Cairo. Obviously things weren’t going as planned. The problem was figuring out whether the random friction of life or an unknown factor was hindering the grand plan.

Luck normally communicated with Caliph by the use of encrypted e-mail, yet now Omar wasn’t answering. Luck finally sent a man from the law firm Corrigan Engineering used in Cairo. The news, when he received it, was grim. Omar Caliph had leaped to his death from his eleventh-floor apartment this past Sunday, an apparent suicide. Rumor had it he left no note.

Corrigan stared at Luck after he relayed the news. “First Vandervelt, now Caliph. It’s almost as if the terrorists knew we were going to help the feds find the bombs.”

“They couldn’t know that,” Luck said. “Vandervelt didn’t know and neither did Caliph.”

“Perhaps they don’t suspect us,” Corrigan mused. “It seems more probable that, as a precaution, they are killing everyone who might betray them.”

True, he had provided the money for the bombs, but that bought him nothing in the eyes of the terrorists. As far as they were concerned, if a bomb ultimately exploded he would get his money’s worth. Even if he and all his friends were dead. After all, if the destruction of your enemies wasn’t worth your life, you didn’t hate enough. And they did.

They couldn’t know that Corrigan didn’t want the bombs to explode, any of them.

Precautionary murder. The next move on the board, he concluded, was for the terrorists to murder him and Luck, sever the last of the ties.

Corrigan had never used that tactic himself, preferring to solve his problems with money and occasionally blackmail. Money works wonders, he knew, because he lived in a place and time and among a people where money was very important. Although money meant little to the Islamic terrorists, he had thought he could induce them to play the role he devised for them. And yet, he realized early on that he had never before played such a dangerous game. He had won all his life by preparing for every contingency. He intended to win this game, too.

He got on the exercise bike and began riding while he thought about it. Frouq al-Zuair and Abdul Abn Saad were damned dangerous men, not greedy engineers in Georgia. He knew a killer who could eliminate them. Corrigan hadn’t planned on doing it so soon, but every day that passed increased the risk. Why wait? The bombs were on their way, the terrorists had done their job.

“It’s time for the Russians,” he told Luck.

“I thought so, too.”

“After they do the ragheads, they need to eliminate Sonny Tran. His usefulness will be at an end.”

“Yes, sir.”

“On your way out turn on the television to CNBC so I can watch the ticker. And send my secretary in. Have her bring her notepad and The Wall Street Journal.”

Luck went to do as he was told.

When he reached his office in the tombs of Langley, Jake Grafton called General Alt on the secure telephone. The executive assistant put him straight through to the chairman. Jake explained the problem. “Either something is buried on Hains Point or the Corrigan detection unit is defective. We must establish which is the case as soon as possible.”

“Which is more likely?”

“We calibrated the Corrigan unit again today on a live weapon. Everything seems to be working the way it’s supposed to.”

“So what’s under that golf course?”

“General, I don’t know. It’s what might be down there that has me worried.”

“The heart of Washington,” the chairman mused. “Heck, I live right across the boat channel in Fort McNair.”

“The seat of American government is within a mile and a half of that site,” Jake remarked. “We’re talking the Capitol, the Pentagon, the White House, the Treasury, Federal Reserve, Supreme Court, FBI—”

“Well, go dig a hole.”

“That was my first thought, sir. Then I had another. If it is a nuke, whoever put it there may be watching it — by satellite if nothing else.”

“We can put a tent up,” Alt shot back, “a big one, biggest we can find. The following evening we’ll bring in a couple of big backhoes and some trucks to haul out the dirt. Work at night and keep the site completely shielded with the tent. Use armed guards to keep spectators as far away as possible.”

“All the golf course personnel will know that something is up,” Jake objected. “If this thing is what we think it is, someone is watching. We go digging around, the wrong people are going to hear about it before long. I’d rather go to a little trouble and do it in such a way that a direct observer can’t tell what we are doing.”

“You know, Grafton, I never really appreciated what a sneaky bastard you are.”

“That’s my second compliment this morning, sir. Clean living and prayer are paying off.”

Alt sighed audibly. “Okay. Do it any way you want.”

“I’m going to need your aides to help me grease this through the system.”

“Of course,” Alt said.

Toad Tarkington and Gil Pascal came into the room after Jake cradled the secure telephone. Captain Pascal said, “We’ve put together a patrol program here in Washington for our one Corrigan unit, Admiral,” and handed Jake the document.

The admiral flipped through it — ten pages, he noted — and pushed it back across the desk.

“Not yet,” he said. He eyed Toad. “You and Sonny and Harley Bennett take the van to New York. Drive up and down beside the rivers, drive the major boulevards of Manhattan and Brooklyn and annotate a map, establish a baseline.”

“Why the rivers, sir?”

“If I were going to attack America with a nuclear weapon, I’d bring it in in a ship or boat. Wouldn’t even have to dock it. Detonate the bomb in the harbor.”

“Do you think one is already here?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Jake Grafton confessed, and toyed with Pascal’s plan. “That golf course hot spot has me worried. That was unexpected.”

“When do you want us to leave, sir?” Toad asked.

“As fast as you can get to the parking lot. Buy a toothbrush and clean underwear in New York. Keep me informed.”

“I’m on my way,” Toad said, and walked out of the room.

“NIMA can’t find Olympic Voyager,” Pascal said as he handed Jake a memo to that effect. “They don’t think she’s in the Med.”

“Oh, she’s probably there, all right,” Jake said carelessly. “On the bottom.”

Later that morning he spent a half hour with FBI agent Harry Estep and two of his colleagues. There was no official record of Olympic Voyager docking or anchoring in the harbor at Port Said, but several informants were sure that she had been there. If cargo was off-loaded or transshipped, there was no written evidence of it.

“Thousands of containers … make that tens of thousands of containers,” Estep said, “go across those docks every week. We’re chasing down the ships that have gone through that port this past week, but I don’t know that we have them all. The port authorities seem cooperative, going through the motions, checking records …” He ran out of steam.

“Any possibility of bribery?” Jake asked softly.

“That’s the third world. Every civil servant has his hand out — all of them!”

“So what if the weapons were transshipped?”

“You know the answer as well as I. They could be sent anywhere, be redirected from port to port, from ship to ship, until finally they arrive wherever the people juggling the shipping documents want them to go.”

“Assume they are destined to come here. How do we intercept them?”

“Search every ship, every container. That’s the only way.”

“Is that possible?”

“No. Too many ships, too many containers.”

“What about intercepting every ship at sea, boarding and searching it with Geiger counters?”

“That might work,” Harry Estep admitted. “If we use every boat and ship the coast guard and navy can get to sea and every airplane that will fly — assuming we’re willing to pay the costs and tolerate the delays — what the hell, it might be possible.”

Jake shooed them out. He stood in front of the map that covered the wall opposite his desk and used his fingers to roughly measure distances.

“Here are the daily FBI reports on those Florida cells,” Zelda said. She didn’t do the “sir” thing. Jake Grafton didn’t care. She placed the file on the desk.

“Please. Close the door and sit.” Jake’s regular telephone had a long cord so he could walk around the office while he talked, and as often happened, the cord was twisted into a knot. He had the receiver off the hook and was busy untwisting the thing as Zelda seated herself. She had more files in her arms and rested them on her lap. He glanced up at her, finished the cord, then placed the receiver back on the hook.

He took his time perusing the reports. “What do you think?” he asked her when he finished.

“If these are terrorist cells, they are waiting for something to happen. I don’t know what. They aren’t really doing anything.”

“I think you’re right.”

He handed the file to her and nodded at the folders on her lap. “What else have you come up with?”

“A lot of nothing,” she said, and placed five files in front of him. The top one was Arch Foster. Inside were telephone records, bank statements, credit card records for a year, even copies of the power company’s records on his house. His car payments — he was never late. Subscribed to three magazines, belonged to a service club … made a complaint to the police six months ago about a loud party down the street.

Norv Lalouette’s file was even thicker. He was a heavy user of the Internet — liked to visit porn sites, apparently. Ordered books from Amazon.com, dabbled in on-line investments — nothing huge, just occasional hundred-share lots. The investment account was worth $27,745.

The other three were Butch Lanham, Coke Twilley, and Sonny Tran, the three people who knew that Janos Ilin said the missing Richard Doyle was a spy and flunked the recognition portion of their lie detector tests. Jake flipped through the files … nothing leaped out.

“I’ll need to study these,” he said. “Is there any way you can put names and addresses to the telephone calls these people made and received?”

“Yes. I have a staffer on that now.”

“So tell me what you think. Using the tools we have, how can we find out more about these people?”

“It would help if I knew why I was looking and what I was looking for.”

Her hair was shampooed and brushed, she was dressed in a nice outfit, her color looked good. She seemed more relaxed than Jake remembered seeing her. Yet still sour.

“How are you and Zip getting along?”

She shrugged.

“Carmellini says Zip’s in love with you.”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business. Or Carmellini’s.”

“I suppose not,” Jake acknowledged.

“You act like a man trying to work himself up to something. Why don’t you just spit it out and we’ll deal with it?”

Jake nodded. “Here’s how it is. I don’t trust you to do the right thing, yet I need your help.”

“Your problem.”

He arranged the files on his desk in a stack and checked that the backs were straight. “We’re looking for four nuclear weapons.” He went into detail, explained what he knew. She asked no questions, just listened. “We need a fresh approach. I want you to think outside the box. If those weapons are coming to America, there will be people here to meet them, perhaps these cells the joint task force is tracking. Perhaps cells they don’t know about. In any event, the people importing these weapons have plans. They are making telephone calls, spending money, talking to confederates, traveling. Your job is to find them. Not all of them — one will do. Some one person. Give me a hint, a trail, some little bit of the string. I don’t care about arrests or prosecutions — that is for the FBI and Justice. I want the bombs.”

“Arch and Norv? Were they part of this?”

“They might have been. It’s possible.” She had been told of Carmellini’s weekend adventure but knew nothing of the blackmail angle, a detail Jake had no intention of sharing. “I think they wanted Carmellini to tell them what is going on in this office. There are other possibilities, by the way. One of them is that they were involved in a Russian spy ring. It’s probable someone killed Richard Doyle; they are the likely candidates. The FBI has a forensic team going over their airplane.”

“Lanham, Twilley, and Tran?”

“They knew Ilin fingered Doyle.”

“I need to think about this,” she murmured.

“Think hard. If a nuke pops in Washington, you’re dead. If it pops anywhere in the U.S., this nation will be irrevocably changed. Before it’s over we may all wish we were dead.”

“No one will be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” she said flippantly. “I got it, Admiral.” She stood. “Anything else?”

“Well …”Jake hesitated, played again with the files. Then he made up his mind and looked up at her, meeting her eyes. “Corrigan Engineering invented a nifty new radiation detector just in time for us to start chasing terrorists with nukes.”

She snorted. “Ain’t it grand the way American industry comes through in the nick of time, just when we need’em? We needed telephones and there was Bell. Cars, and Henry Ford showed up. Airplanes, and the Wright brothers delivered in time for World War One. We could talk all day about Bill Gates, or Saint Bill, as he likes to be called. Are we lucky or what?”

“Check out Corrigan.”

“You’re a suspicious bastard, aren’t you?”

Jake brightened. “Wow, three compliments this week. Go get’em, Zelda.”

“My name is Sarah Houston,” she growled, and marched from the office.

So the feds knew about the bombs. Nguyen Duc Tran thought about that fact as he piloted his big eighteen-wheel rig south on the interstate. He didn’t turn on the radio — most of the stations played country music and Nguyen Duc Tran hated it. Country was too schmaltzy, too sweet, too stupid … too American. Nor did he want to listen to the smart people on NPR talk to the people who thought they were smart. He had some classical and jazz CDs in the box, but today he wasn’t in the mood. He kept the tractor at sixty-five and let the hum of the engine and the unwinding endless highway smooth him over and chill him down.

And the feds had Sonny looking for the damned things! If that wasn’t a hoot!

Nguyen Duc Tran hated America. He had lived here since he was five years old and spoke only English, but he hated the place and the people and their decadent, rotten values.

He and his brother grew up in Texas. His parents were professional people with standing in Vietnam — his father a career army officer — but after they escaped from Saigon before the fall in 1975, they wound up in Texas. The only work his father could find was as a janitor. His mother cleaned houses. Sonny and Nguyen grew up as Vietnamese niggers, loathed and endlessly teased about being Viet Cong. Communists. Cong Tran they called him in school.

“You South Viets lost the fucking war, Cong, let those fucking Ho Chi Minh-ers kick your asses. Even the U.S. Army couldn’t save your sorry butts. So you came over here and took jobs away from good Americans when you couldn’t hold on to your own shitty little country. Why don’t you go back there, huh, raise the IQ of Texas and Vietnam?” He had gotten a lot of that growing up, back when he was too small to fight back.

Sonny was smart, a great student, and he won scholarships to California colleges. Nguyen was only mediocre in school. He dropped out of junior college after a year and became a commercial truck driver. When he could find work. “Think you’re big enough to drive this fucking truck, boy? Hell, you don’t weigh 140 pounds. All that fucking rice and fish heads.”

He had learned enough karate, finally, to take care of the worst of the big-bellied bastards. It didn’t take much. A punch in the throat, an elbow in the pot gut, or a well-aimed kick in the groin would usually put them down. Then they flopped around like whales on the beach.

Sonny hated them, too. Oh, he had played the game all his life, but he hated them as much as Nguyen did. Maybe more. Hated these people and their money and their cultural superiority and the mindless way they interfered with the lives of people all over the globe, because Americans knew best. Knew what was right for everyone.

They poured money and weapons and endless reams of worthless free advice on the lesser folk … then they left when the going got rough and let their friends take the fall. Lose everything. Do the dying.

And they didn’t care. Didn’t care a good goddamn.

Today the spell of the road eased Nguyen past the black mood. And the thought of the weapons.

He and Sonny were going to make the bastards pay. Oh, were they going to pay!

The ragheads had shown them how. You had to hate them enough to be willing to die to make them pay. If you did, it was easy. Oh so easy.

His thoughts turned to Dutch Vandervelt. Did the raghead motherfuckers figure out they were being double-crossed? If they did, his bomb wasn’t going to arrive where it should.

He thought about that. About what he would do.

You just have to play hardball. Anyone who thought he could play it tougher than Nguyen Duc Tran was kidding himself.

After the doctor smeared his feet with an antiseptic desensitizing cream and wrapped them in bandages, Tommy Carmellini carefully donned a set of oversized tennis shoes and rode a wheelchair to the front door of the Naval Hospital in Bethesda. Rain was falling from a slate sky. A taxi was waiting. As a nurse stood watching, he gingerly tried out his new feet. Yep, if he walked slow and easy … He eased himself into the backseat of the taxi and waved good-bye to the nurse.

Thirty minutes later he was back at his apartment building. His car was still in the parking lot. Fortunately the FBI had recovered his keys and wallet and returned them to him, although they never mentioned his pistol and he didn’t ask. The pistol would have been no big deal in most of the United States, but owning and possessing one in the District of Columbia was illegal. Like every other law on the books, this one was also ignored by crooks, dope dealers, and gang-bangers who continued to use guns as they preyed on the unarmed and each other. Presumably the knowledge that most of their constituents were unarmed made the local politicians feel more secure.

As the rain dampened him down, Carmellini opened the trunk of his car and looked in. Yep, the Winchester was still there. Maybe the FBI didn’t search the car.

The agents had carefully searched the apartment. Estep and his colleagues had found twelve bugs, he said, and removed them. He had been reasonably confident that they had gotten all of them, but one never knew.

The place felt stuffy; Carmellini opened several windows. Then he lowered himself into his favorite chair and reached for his remote. He flipped through the channels looking for a ball game. Nope. He clicked the television off.

His feet were still tender. He put them up on his coffee table to keep them from swelling and sat listening to the city noises coming through the window and savoring the cool damp air. Like most people, he rarely stopped to appreciate the moment, celebrate the sublime sensual pleasure of being alive. Just now he was acutely aware of how close he had come to losing it.

He looked up the Graftons’ telephone number in a notebook he had lying beside the telephone and dialed it. “Mrs. Grafton, this is Tommy Carmellini …. Doing just fine, thanks. Is your houseguest, Anna, available?”

The Russian woman’s voice had a delicate, delicious quality — it was almost as if all the languages she spoke gave her a unique personal accent. Carmellini thought he could detect a note of warmth in her voice when she asked about him. Would she still like to go to dinner? He knew a place, he said. She agreed and he set the time, then said good-bye.

He made the effort to put the telephone on the floor beside his chair and stretched out. Actually the chair was quite comfortable and his feet on the table were at just the right height. With a breeze stirring the curtains and caressing his cheek, his mind wandered to his parents and his childhood days. Carmellini drifted off to sleep with the sound of gentle rain pattering on the window pane.

A noise in the hallway outside his apartment woke him. Or perhaps it had been outside. Some noise that shouldn’t be there. He lay with his eyes closed, listening intently.

Rain hitting the window glass. Nothing else.

Now he opened his eyes, moved them around without moving his head, looking at everything in his field of view — the objects in the familiar room, the dancing curtains, rain smearing the window glass and dampening the sill.

Arch Foster and Norv Lalouette wanted him dead because they had tried to recruit him for something, and he turned them down. Something they didn’t want other people knowing about. He had nothing even lukewarm going in his office right now. They probably wanted him to spy on Jake Grafton. What else could it have been? Did he have that figured right?

He didn’t know anything compromising about anyone. Or to be more precise, any live person. Even if someone thought he did, he had had two days to blab to the FBI and the Maryland State Police and anyone else on God’s green earth he could telephone or write to.

Damage control for Arch and Norv’s friends would certainly not involve silencing him: Would it?

“You’re all assholes,” he said aloud to anyone who might be listening. “Arch and Norv were assholes, and so are you.”

Angry with himself for being in this mood, he levered himself erect and padded carefully into the bathroom to give himself a sponge bath and shave. The dressings on his feet were good until tomorrow, and in any event he didn’t want to fool with them tonight.

An hour later he stood in front of the door to his apartment, listening carefully. He put his eye to the peephole. Then he unlocked the door and pulled it open.

In the lobby he stopped at the door to the building and surveyed the parking lot. Still an hour or so before dark. The rain had stopped but the clouds were low and the wind had picked up. No one in sight. Yet even as Carmellini stood there a car rolled into the lot and slid into a parking place. A fit man in his late twenties or early thirties got out and headed for the lobby.

Carmellini stared, trying to recognize him.

Suddenly anger flooded him. “Shit!” he muttered, pushed the door open, and stalked out as confidently as he could on sore feet. He ignored the man going into the building — didn’t even glance at him.